Inspired by Winter Duel, which has one central choke-point, Phil's Duel extends to include fall-back choke-points and flanking routes (including ocean) to make for even more epic battles. Air and sea support are essential for a successful strategy here.

AI markers are supported, and Sorian's AI will give you a decent epic battle.

Buildable / moveable areas:

Some screenshots taken during development: (click for full size)

This is my first released map, so I'd appreciate any feedback on the game-play / style.

Thanks guys, if you have a game on it I'd appreciate hearing how it went in terms of game-play (e.g. Too much mass, difficulty cracking turtles, etc...)

In the tests I did with the AI, I found it fairly easy to break into their base using T3 battleships to damage their economy followed up by a T2/T3/T4 land army making a push into one of their expansion areas.
Rushing was also very useful in gaining an advantage but if you let the AI have a head start they'll provide you with some good turtle cracking practice.

What's good:
- Zoomed out, it looks great - one of the more professional looking maps I've seen. The landscape looks very natural, and the texturing looks good too.
- The general layout is great as well; it's always nice to see a map where expanding and controlling land really matters.
- The game I had was fun and fast-paced - I imagine this would be pretty exciting against a human player, with each side constantly trying to push their borders forward.

What could use improving:
- Some of the mass deposits around the middle aren't aligned to the grid
- Zoomed in, I could see that there's a lot of jagged edges leftover from importing the heightmap. The land around the cliffs is seriously spikey, which gets in the way of building and makes hitting targets that bit harder for ground units, which isn't good on an already cramped map You'll need to zoom in close, rotate the camera a bit, and smooth them out with the blur tool.
- The start locations seemed a bit cramped and overly close to the edge of the map to me. For human players it's not much of an issue, since the majority of their base will probably be built towards the centre of the map, but the AI always stays with their first four mass deposits and ended up struggling for space. As well as looking pretty ugly, being cramped into a corner like that also causes problems with attacking aircraft flying off the map, where they basically become invincible
- Minor gripes, but you might want to find a better skycube and water ramp and adjust the properties to give the map more polish. Bright blue water with a bright red sun reflecting in it looks pretty odd

I'm well on my way to a much more polished version now, and the AI is much better now. I had island markers present in the first version, which it turns out stops the AI from attempting large land invasion. Removing these markers fixed most of my AI problems in one go!

I'm also detailing everything with decals, fixing up the waves, and have tweaked the height-map a bit to make cracking turtles a bit easier - I want a territory defence map where offence isn't totally overwhelmed by turtle power.

Love_Reptiles wrote:

Though The mass does seem a bit un even from the right to left sides

Yeah, I only did them by eye, not mathematically, so they're not quite even. I'll fix this in v2 as well.

Vance wrote:

- Some of the mass deposits around the middle aren't aligned to the grid

Fixed

Vance wrote:

- Zoomed in, I could see that there's a lot of jagged edges leftover from importing the heightmap. The land around the cliffs is seriously spikey, which gets in the way of building and makes hitting targets that bit harder for ground units, which isn't good on an already cramped map You'll need to zoom in close, rotate the camera a bit, and smooth them out with the blur tool.

I've fixed up most of the spikey areas now, but lots of units still start shooting before they actually have LOS and just shoot directly into hill-sides... I'll try to alleviate this as much as possible, but I think it's always going to happen to some degree on maps like this.

Vance wrote:

- The start locations seemed a bit cramped and overly close to the edge of the map to me. For human players it's not much of an issue, since the majority of their base will probably be built towards the centre of the map, but the AI always stays with their first four mass deposits and ended up struggling for space. As well as looking pretty ugly, being cramped into a corner like that also causes problems with attacking aircraft flying off the map, where they basically become invincible

Yeah, this is a bit annoying now that you mention it. I can't really fix it without either a major overhaul of the design, or by making the map larger to add more area behind the spawns. I'll probably opt for the latter at a later stage.

Vance wrote:

- Minor gripes, but you might want to find a better skycube and water ramp and adjust the properties to give the map more polish. Bright blue water with a bright red sun reflecting in it looks pretty odd

Thanks for the link I didn't know about the hot-keys for decals that were posted in that thread either.
I've changed the water ramp now and it looks much better, but when I start a game I still have the old bright blue water! Is there some kind of trick to getting these settings to save properly?

' The start locations seemed a bit cramped and overly close to the edge of the map to me. For human players it's not much of an issue, since the majority of their base will probably be built towards the centre of the map, but the AI always stays with their first four mass deposits and ended up struggling for space. As well as looking pretty ugly, being cramped into a corner like that also causes problems with attacking aircraft flying off the map, where they basically become invincible "

I actually think that adds to the flavor of the map, means you gotta expand outward. While the AI may stay in its corner they tend to do that in every map and the flying Aircraft things isnt really a fault of the map its a game issue, and smart commanders wont build all long the edge anyways. Not that I dont think there should be more room but forcing you to go out and find more build area is a good characteristic.

I really like the map, after a little tweaking it will be in my top playlists for a while to come

I've changed the water ramp now and it looks much better, but when I start a game I still have the old bright blue water! Is there some kind of trick to getting these settings to save properly?

If you're on medium fidelity settings, then that'll be why. It basically changes all water to an ugly bright blue and removes a bunch of the normals, so if you switch to high it should look as it does in the editor.

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